William H. Calvin, A Brief History of the Mind (Oxford
University Press 2004).
See also http://WilliamCalvin.com/BHM/index.htm

William H. Calvin SEATTLE, WASHINGTON 98195-1800 USA

Calvin maps the environmental influences (such as changing climates
and the need to throw a spear accurately) that shaped the evolution
of our mental hardware. About 50,000 years ago, he says, long after
Homo sapiens had that hardware available, a new mental
operating system appeared. This software upgrade featured
syntax, which allowed language to express complex nested concepts, a
mental "big bang" that enormously facilitated our ancestors' ability
to structure their lives, to anticipate and plan.... Calvin's
most compelling insight is that our minds are not ideal for the
world we have made. Evolution has adapted us for different
conditions and works too slowly to bail us out now: "Clearly, human
cultural innovation is now in charge of getting the bugs out, not
biological evolution. And we haven't made much progress yet."
--Ralph
Bowden in the Nashville Scene.

There is an exceptionally nice long review from the other side of the world:

What Calvin does... is provide a sensible
and accessible reflection on the cognitive roots of many of our confusions
and failings. Even more importantly, in his final chapter, ‘The Future of
the Augmented Mind’, he argues for a down to earth approach to coping with
the defects of the mind we have acquired by natural selection....
--Paul Monk in
the
Australian Financial Review

Instead of starting
with a big bang, this book leads up to one – the “Mind’s Big Bang.”
It’s a vista from a crossroads, looking back at simpler versions of
mental life, taking stock of what we have now, and then speculating
about mind’s future. For we are at a crossroads in another sense,
that of a frontier where the rules are about to change, where mind
shifts gears again.

Because our
less imaginative ancestors couldn’t think about the future in much
detail, they were trapped in a here-and-now existence. No “What if”
and “Why me?” With their unstructured type of mental life, you
couldn’t narrate a life story or conceive of dying someday. To keep
mental concepts from blending together like a summer drink, humans
need some mental structuring for long sentences and complex
thoughts. In saying “I think I saw him leave to go home,” you are
nest­ing three sentences inside a fourth like Russian dolls. Other
aspects of thought are structured too: multi-stage planning, games
with rules that constrain possible moves, chains of logic,
struct­ured music. We have a fascination with discovering hidden
order, with imagining how things hang together.

Where does mind
go from here, its powers extended by science-enhanced education and
new tools – but with its slowly-evolving gut instincts still firmly
anchored to the ice ages? We will likely shift mental gears again,
into juggling more concepts simultaneously and making decisions even
faster – but the faster you go, the more danger of spinning out of
control. Ethics, morals, a sense of “what’s right” are possible
only because of a human level of ability to speculate about the
future and modify our possible actions accordingly. Though science
increasingly serves as our headlights, we are out driving them,
going faster than we can react effectively.

"Can
you tell the story of the world in an evening around the
campfire, the way an old-fashioned shaman used to do?" The
history of the mind is surprisingly brief. Instead of starting
with a big bang, I lead up to one – the “Mind’s Big Bang” – and
then look beyond, to mind’s next advances.

Chimps may not be as sociable with
humans as a dog that thinks you are its pack leader, or a cat that
mistakes you for its mother, but chimp-to-chimp they clearly have a
substant­ial fraction of instinctive human social behavior. They
even play blind man’s buff. Yet they don’t plan ahead very much.

The dark woods are not where we want
to be. We prefer fewer
trees, along with a view of some water and grass – which is why
waterfront property is now so expensive. Our ancestors were
likely digging up veggies, but not making sharp tools. Did the
bipedal apes stand upright for the view, to carry the baby, or to
avoid taking the midday “heat hit” on the broad back?

In
Africa, there was a spinoff with a bigger brain. A new species
usually starts out as a small, isolated population. Imagine, say,
the big company’s branch office in Nairobi losing communication with
the parent and having to manage on its own ideas and resources, to
sink or swim as an independent in a worsening climate.

Food preparation likely began, maybe
even cooking the savory stew. By 1.7 million years ago, Homoerectus
had spread out of Africa into the grasslands of Asia and was eating
a lot of meat. Accurate throwing is a difficult task for the
brain. You can’t rely on progress reports as you launch (your
nerves are too slow). Without timely feedback, you have to make the
perfect plan as you “get set” – and there are a million ways to get
it wrong, any one of which will cause dinner to run away. So better
short-term planning has an immediate payoff. Perhaps that improved
their planning for other occasions as well.

When the
ice age climate switched into oscillations that were slower and
bigger, brain size started growing faster. But why? More demanding
hunting techniques? Or ought we to be thinking about the beginnings
of protolanguage, the short sentences of modern two-year-olds but
without the structur­ing needed for long sentences?

If the
hominids of 400,000 years ago could stage both tool­making and food
preparation, perhaps their life of the mind included other kinds of
agendas as well, with more of an eye to the future. Asking whether
Neanderthals could speak illum­­inates some of the changes of the
previous million years.

Here we are coming up on the last few
minutes of the up-from-the-apes movie, and our vaunted intelligence
still hasn’t made its first appearance. Our ancestors were Homo sapiens
for 100,000 years but, despite the big brain, they were not
“behaviorally modern”
Homo sapienssapiens.
Simple forms of proto­structure such as framing and “theory of mind”
were likely present, and perhaps the protolanguage like that of
modern two-year-olds.
Clearly, brain size wasn’t sufficient to produce spectacular
results. It must have taken something more.

In saying
“I think I saw him leave to go home,” you are nest­ing three
sentences inside a fourth. Other aspects of thought are structured
too: multistage planning, games with rules that constrain possible
moves, chains of logic, struct­ured music. This structured suite
likely aided the giant step up to the modern mind. Did it take
another genetic change to become behaviorally modern, or was
accumulating culture alone able to trigger the boom by giving babies
enough struct­ured stuff to hear so that they softwired their brains
earlier? And so excelled as adults?

A period between 60,000 to 40,000
years ago looks like the probable time of migration ofmodern humans into the more
exotic parts of Eurasia. And it looks as if they became
behav­iorally modern in important respects not long before leaving
Africa. The lack of time to “debug” the new abilities, before the
rough-around-the-edges prototype expanded out of Africa, might be
thought of as the first worldwide distribution of crash-prone
software.

We have a
fascination with discovering hidden order, with imagining how things
hang together. And the problem with creativity is not in putting
together novel mixtures – a little confusion may suffice – but in
managing the incoherence. Things often don’t hang together properly
– as in our night­time dreams, full of people, places, and occasions
that don’t fit together very well. What sort of on-the-fly process
does it take to convert such an incoherent mix into a coherent
compound, whether it be an on-target movement program or a novel
sentence to speak aloud?

Once
agriculture allowed towns and specialized occupations to develop by
6,000 years ago (the last few seconds of the movie), writing
developed from tax accounting about 5,000 years ago. Education now
helps us to deal with our fallible minds, to “unlearn” our intuitive
but erroneous Aristotelian physics, our intuitive biology of vital
essences, and our intuitive notions of engineering that make
Darwinian evolution so difficult to comprehend. Medicine now calms
the voices and delusions, dampens the obsessions and compulsions,
and lifts the depressions. In addition to patch­ing us up, might
mind medicine eventually “improve” us?

For fans of how
and why
questions, a brief summary of the most recent Major Transition in
evolution. There are a half-dozen candidates so far for the
transition to behaviorally modern Homo sapiens sapiens.
All may be essential but not sufficient by themselves. The question
is not when the last stone is added to the archway but which has a
growth curve that becomes steeper and steeper, building on itself.
The EvoDevo candidate, those precocious kids softwiring their brains
earlier to become more capable adults, could double and redouble the
percentage of syntax users in only a few generations.

As an
example of four levels, fleece
is organized into yarn,
which is woven into cloth,
which can be arranged into clothing.
As we advance beyond the one-word level of language after the
morning cup of coffee, we begin talking about relationships (“This
is bigger than that”). With a second cup, we can advance another
level to analogies (“Bigger is better”). Poets have to compare
candidate metaphors, however, requiring all manner of superstitious
practices in order to shore up their mental house of cards and
stabilize a new level.

Where does mind go from here, its
powers extended by science-enhanced education and new tools – but
with its slowly evolving gut instincts still firmly anchored to the
ice ages? We will likely shift mental gears
again, into juggling more concepts simultaneously and making
decisions even faster – but the faster you go, the more danger of
spinning out of control. Ethics, morals, a sense of “what’s right”
are possible only because of a human level of ability to speculate
about the future and modify our possible actions accordingly. But
science increasingly serves as our “headlights,” and we are “out
driving” them, going faster than we can react effectively.